Jill's PLAF Diary for Friday, September 12–Saturday, September 13

Urban ECHO: Circle Told
I love site-specific work, and if it can happen in a location as beautiful as The Rotunda (even despite its dire need for upkeep), so much the better. The Leah Stein Dance Company worked in collaboration with the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia to create this inventive and often touching piece of performance in which dancers and vocalists came together to depict urban environments and human interaction in modern times. Interestingly, there are three blind members of the Meldelssohn club, and one of them, a local poet whom I've seen at events around the city (and whose name I can't remember), participated in a lovely, vulnerable, and very moving pas de troix with two of the Stein dancers. If the show had any faults (other than the suffocating warmness inside the venue), it was only that during its most powerful moments like these, the audience's view was partially obstructed by the other members of the company, who stood in a circle around the perimeter of the dance floor—in front of the audience. It was probably intended to foster intimacy, but it ended up being obtrusive and tempered my enjoyment of what I'd otherwise call a stellar show.

The show must go on
Yesterday in Monday Manners, I referred to The show must go on as the kind of show that you either "get" or you don't. And I got it—despite the presence of about half a dozen hecklers in the audience at the Kimmel Center who didn't. I think what I liked best about The show must go on was that it played out like a joke that we were all in on, only some of us were quicker to understand the punchline than others. The lights don't come up on the stage until a song and a half has passed; two and a half songs went by before we saw any performers, and three songs, plus the verse of a fourth, were played before anyone on the stage did anything but stand there and stare at the audience and the fully visible tech guy. And when there was dancing, it was, more often than not, more parody than performance. I got the feeling that this is what Everyone was trying to do, but failed at miserably. Jérôme Bel's performance, staged with an American cast for the first time, succeeded because it had its proverbial tongue firmly planted in its cheek, and because it invited the audience to serve as active participants rather than as passive observers. When the cast left the stage and all the lights went down during John Lennon's "Imagine," we all knew what to do: take out our cell phones and make like we were holding up lighters at a Skynyrd show. We danced in the aisles, we sang along, filling in missing lyrics to "The Sound of Silence," and we laughed. I laughed so hard that I practically cried, both from amusement and from sheer, unadulterated joy just from the experience. When the show ended, naturally with Queen's "The Show Must Go On," those of us in the know cheered. There couldn't possibly have been a better way to end the Festival.